I chose to do my research over stress in new nurses. The specific article I chose was called The Relationship Between Task Mastery, Role Clarity, Social Acceptance, and Stress: An intensive Longitudinal Study with a Sample of Newly Registered Nurses by Elin Frögéli*, Ann Rudman, and Petter Gustavsson. This article surveyed new registered nurses working for the first time in a hospital setting in Sweden. It discusses the importance of recognizing and reducing stress in new nurses. Stress, task mastery, role clarity, and social acceptance are discussed each week for 3 months through an online survey. Each participant completes the survey at the end of each week. The data showed that there is a decrease of stress when a new nurse feels confident in his/her role clarity, tasks, and social acceptance. Although this study was done in Sweden, I think it pertains to many hospitals in the United States. Stress is significantly high in new nurses as well as seasoned nurses. I think reducing the amount of stress on a new nurse, can help increase job satisfaction.
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I agree with your fishbone about seasoned nurses can be tired of training new nurses, which is where the whole “nurses eat their own/young” comes from. I know when I worked on the floor the turn over was high and with a constant supply of new graduates there was always someone to train. This made you feel like you were doing double the work. A new nurse is likely to feel this tension and that could easily add to the stress they are already feeling just from learning their new career. “Forty-eight percent of graduating nurses are afraid that they’ll become the target of workplace bullying. More than 60 percent of all new nurses quit their first job due to the bad behavior of their co-workers.” Those are some scary statistics if you ask me!
Nurses Eating Their Young: Bullying or Hazing? (2019, June 12). Retrieved from https://www.americansentinel.edu/blog/2016/01/22/nurses-eating-their-young-bullying-or-hazing/
60 percent of new nurses quitting their first job is a crazy high number. I have also witnessed many nurses getting tired of training the constant influx of new nurses. I hope that someday there will be a better answer to this. As a new nurse it is very frustrating when you’re trying to learn and no one wants to teach you.
Hi cdgabel. There is no doubt that new nurses have to feel the pressure of succeeding. I can remember back when I was a new nurse I was constantly worried about missing something. Funny thing is I still am that way. I found an article that might come in handy for you. It is about reducing front line nurse stress and burnout. It is about how an organization realizes that the key to preventing such problems is to have the staff engaged and energized into their work. And when they implement change, they do it meaningful. There are three primary strategies to successfully support staff in managing stress and burnout. They are limiting the volume of organization-wide communication, directing staff to highest-priority information, and mitigating the pace of change (Koppel, Virkstis, Strumwasser, Katz,& Boston-Fleischhauer, 2015).
Koppel, J., Virkstis, K., Strumwasser, S., Katz, M., & Boston-Fleishhauer, C. (2015). Regulating the flow of change to reduce frontline nurse stress and burnout. The Journal of Nursing Administration, 45(11), 534-536.
Thank you for the article! I think their strategies are great for helping reduce burnout. I am a fairly new nurse and there are constantly times that I stress about forgetting or missing something. I help with some high risk procedures so finding ways to reduce the extra little stressors is great!
I can definitely understand where this information is coming from. Many nursing units have a high turnover rate, my unit has maintained slightly over 80% for some time. I was also part of a study of stress on new graduate nurses and which techniques helped alleviate stress. The group I was in consisted of about 30 new graduates and each day over the course of a month, we had 15 minutes or so of an intervention (such as calming music) and rated our stress levels. We continued to rate stress levels over the course of the first year of employment each month. It was a study for promoting retention, and I am not sure what results were like. I think that it is a stressful job, and that our “good days” are sometimes worse than other professions’ “bad days”, so it’s all relative. I do agree with everything that you included on your fish bone diagram, especially the burnout of seasoned nurses training new nurses. Personally, I don’t mind students or helping new nurses, but when it is 100% of your job it is too much stress. I also think an important thing to keep in mind is that for new nurses or experienced nurses, when it gets stressful ask for help, and if another nurse is stressed offer to help. I feel that in our career working as a team is a necessity.
I agree, I think that teamwork is an absolute necessity. There are days that as a nurse, we get overwhelmed and there is just too much on our plate. But asking for help is something that can tremendously reduce stress and workload. I am super fortunate to be working in a unit that is always willing to help one another out.
I still remember the stress of being a new nurse. I spent a few of my first days in tears. I also can relate to training new nurses and the extra stress that can come with that also. I found an article about a study done on newly graduated nurses’ pre-employment health lifestyles that play a particular important role in their smooth adaptation to and retention in clinical nursing. However, the longitudinal relationship between pre-employment health lifestyles and work outcomes, such as turnover, remains underexamined. “This study identified significant differences in patterns of newly graduated nurses pre-employment health lifestyles; our analysis showed that classification in the unhealthy lifestyle group was a turnover risk factor. Given that new nurses’ health lifestyles affect work outcomes, hospitals should implement organizational and educational initiatives to encourage healthy lifestyles. In considering pre-employment health lifestyle profiles, hospitals should also monitor novice nurses’ adaptation and wellness. Nursing education should include strategies to enhance nursing students’ own health. Further extensive longitudinal studies should seek to identify the health lifestyle profiles of heterogeneous nurse populations.” I really like your topic as it does relate to my topic about mental health, which in turn results in nurse burnout.
Reference:
Hye, Y., Kihye, H., Sungju, L., K. Yeon-Hee. (2019). Pre-employment health lifestyle profiles and actual turnover among newly graduated nurses: A descriptive and prospective longitudinal study. International Journal of Nursing Studies. 98 pg. 1-8.
The amount of stress, even on seasoned nurses, leads to compassion fatigue and burnout. Typically nurses become resistant to utilizing or developing coping mechanisms when faced with an abundance of stress. The signs and impact of compassion fatigue are profound and often lead to poor work performance, absenteeism, the expression of the desire to quit or even leave the profession, and strained or confrontational interactions with their coworkers (Donald et al. 2017). Originally, health care facilities sought to address compassion fatigue and burnout by implementing programs that taught self-care methods as it was believed that this was the cause. After further research, it is presently believed that teaching self-care methods is important but that the most successful way to combat compassion fatigue is to implement programs that teachh mindful-based stress reduction (Wayment,2019). These programs teach compassion-based skills and compassion satisfaction which is the pleasure that you get when you feel like you are helping someone and that your work matters. These programs might prove to be successful if introduced upon a new graduate nurse’s entry into the field.
Donald, G. et al. (2019). Experiences of nurses and other health workers participating in a reflective course on compassion-based care. British Journal of Nursing, Aug 8; 28(15): 1020-1025. Doi 10.12968/bjon.2019.28.15.1020
Wayment, H. et al (2019). A brief “quiet ego” workplace intervention to reduce compassion fatigue and improve health in hospital healthcare workers. Applied Nursing Research, 49: 80-85. doi: 10.1016.j.apnr.2019.05.002
I have heard for a long time that nurses should learn self-care methods but I think that implementing programs that teach mindful-based stress reduction would be a better option. Self-care will always and should always be important but it is also important for nurses to find ways to adequately learn how to reduce stress.
It’s essential that the more seasonal nurses are attentive to new nurses and more helpful when they’re showing signs that they are stress or struggling with something so that the new nurses gain trust and comfort from their coworkers, which will allow them to be more open to ask questions and not feel like they are stressed or by themselves that everyone is there to help with the patients. Critical care nurses are at risk for burnout and secondary traumatic stress, being able to provide nurses no matter if they’re a new grad or seasonal nurses. Promoting personal self-care and organizational wellness approaches that consider cultural norms should be designed to boost compassion satisfaction and reduce negative effects of stressful work environments (JTN.2020 p.59).
Salimi, S., Pakpour, V., Rahmani, A., Wilson, M., & Feizollahzadeh, H. (2020). Compassion Satisfaction, Burnout, and Secondary Traumatic Stress Among Critical Care Nurses in Iran. Journal of transcultural nursing: official journal of the Transcultural Nursing Society, 31(1), 59–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/1043659619838876
Caitlin,
I like that this study focused on a sense of belonging and role clarity as well as task mastery. These are all sources of stress for new nurses. In the midst of a critical nursing shortage, retention of new nurses is so important. Nursing is a difficult and demanding career and requires so much of each of person, not only intellectually but also emotionally. When people are new to nursing or even transitioning to another nursing field that is new to them, meeting patients’ needs while fitting in with the other nursing staff and navigating a novel environment takes all the mental resources of the new nurse. If other nurses make the transition unnecessarily difficult we will lose nurses. The more experienced nurses may be experiencing burnout themselves and have compassion fatigue. My unit experienced some of this. I’ve found myself in the role of mentor for nurses who are still struggling after orientation. Supporting a sense of belonging in both the new nurse and the existing staff seems to be critical to promoting the empathy that will carry the new nurse through the rough period of adjustment and make the rest of the staff more likely to help struggling novices. These nurses acquired the basic knowledge and skills necessary for competency in nursing school. Now they are learning to apply what they know and manage multiple concurrent demands on their time. The social support of the experienced nurses is vital and can help the novice nurses feel accepted and that they belong. This helps them handle the stress of nursing and remain in their jobs.
Vinales, J.J. (2015). The mentor as a role model and the importance of belongingness. British Journal of Nursing, 24(10), 532-535. doi: 10.12968/bjon.2015.24.10.532
As a nurse, self care is always important. As a new nurse trying to avoid burn out, self care is critical! Stress plays a number on new nurses, from learning new things, to new software to new doctors and clinics and many different things. It is overwhelming and stressful. We, as nurses, care for people who are at a time of need and if we as nurses have not been taking care of ourselves, then we cannot take care of our patients properly and fully. “Now is the time to educate nurses and employers on the importance of nurse self-care,” the report states. “Nurses give the best care to patients when they are operating at their own peak wellness.”
So what is self care. Self-care is any deliberate activity that we do in an effort to provide for our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. It is important for workers in every field, but especially for nurses, who spend their working hours caring for others. Self-care reduces stress, replenishes a nurse’s capacity to provide compassion and empathy, and improves the quality of care.
Purdue University Global. (2019, February 13). Importance of Self-Care for Nurses and How to Put a Plan in Place. Retrieved March 1, 2020, from https://www.purdueglobal.edu/blog/nursing/self-care-for-nurses/